Key Takeaways
- Evolving Search: Developing an AI Overview strategy is critical as this AI tool will transform how users find information.
- Core Strategy: Optimise content for AI Overviews to maintain visibility and leverage “qualified clicks.”
- Cross-Platform Application: Apply AI Overview principles across multiple AI channels beyond Google.
- Entity SEO and Authority: Focus on comprehensive content, topical authority, and a strong online presence.
- Implementation and Adaptation: Develop a detailed, resource-backed plan and continuously refine your strategy based on evolving trends and impacts.
AI Overviews are to search engines what the internet was to libraries
It’s 1985 and you are sitting at home with a perm and a shoulder-padded shirt. Suddenly “Take On Me” blazes out of the wooden framed TV. A woman wearing Lycra jumps across the screen doing the coolest new fitness craze. You love it! However, you have a question. “What should I eat to become better at aerobics?”
In this pre-internet age, there is only one solution. You quickly pick up your Walkman, stick on your shell suit and skateboard 40 minutes to the nearest library. However, after spending 3 hours trying to find the right book you discover “Jane Fondas Workout” has been checked out and is not due to be returned until next week.
Thankfully, the internet and search engines have revolutionised how we find information, adapting to user behaviour and intent. Yet, just like libraries became relics of the past, SEOs need to adapt to the future of search. They need an AI Overview strategy.
AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews, formerly Search Generative Experience (SGE), are changing SEO. This feature aggregates information from the web to answer user queries directly, potentially reducing website clicks. The question then becomes: how can we optimise our content to be included in these AI Overviews and maintain online visibility?
This article equips you with the steps to build a winning AI Overview strategy, ensuring your content reaches users even in this evolving search environment.
Thinking beyond Google
While developing an AI Overview strategy is essential, the basic principles extend beyond Google’s search platform. Answer Engine Optimisation shares many similarities and follows similar principles for optimisation.
Moreover, Microsoft Copilot offers similar functionality to AI Overviews within the Bing search engine.
Moreover, such is the scale of change, new platforms have emerged. This includes AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity AI. While they do not provide a list of website links, they aggregate information. Consequently, building an AI Overview strategy can be a great starting point for ensuring your content is visible across multiple AI channels.
Appreciating the value of “qualified clicks” is fundamental to an AI Overview Strategy
Since AI snippets aggregate information from multiple sources, it’s easy to assume there is no value in developing an AI Overview strategy. After all, if nobody is going to click on your website, what’s the point?
However, Google AI Overview provides website links. This is similar to other AI tools like those seen in Bing and Perplexity. For instance, if you search “why are NMN supplements trending” Google’s AI Overviews provides an answer using multiple sources and then offers links to articles like the one we at Antlerzz wrote about NMN industry trends.
Fabrice Canel, product manager at Bing calls these “qualified clicks.” In short, Canel claims these “qualified clicks” are even more valuable because they aim to answer a user’s query more precisely. Moreover, these AI tools understand user intent and behaviour, providing information tailored to a specific user.
Therefore, website owners can obtain search traffic from their target users, many of whom are further down the sales funnel. While Bing is a different platform, the same principles apply to Google, meaning an AI Overview strategy is critical to obtaining this lucrative traffic source.
The key elements of AI Overview Strategy
A good AI Overview Strategy involves understanding a combination of principles and skills. This includes:
- Concepts: Understanding Entity SEO is critical for an effective AI Overview strategy. This means going beyond keywords and thinking in concepts rather than keywords
- Niche: Topical authority is built off a strong Entity SEO strategy and is vital for the future of AI search. This means positioning yourself as an expert in a specific niche.
- Building authority: While optimising your on-page elements such as content is important, you must also develop authority in the wider online ecosystem.
- Funnel: AI Overviews will disrupt how the traditional search funnel works. For instance, by aggregating information and prioritising credible sources, it can move users more quickly to the best solutions, eliminating the need for them to sift through countless websites. This will directly influence user behaviour.
Therefore, when developing an AI Overview strategy, it’s important to consider these principles at each stage.
11 steps to developing an AI Overview Strategy
It’s easy to bury your head and continue working on your existing SEO efforts. While this is important, and forms the basis for an effective AI Overview strategy, you cannot stand still.
For instance, until the 1970s many people were woken by a tap on their window. Without alarm clocks, a “knocker-upper” ensured people got to work on time. Imagine if that knocker-upper refused to evolve. How successful would he be today?
The point is that things are changing faster than ever. Recently, interest in SGE (AI Overviews) has skyrocketed 156%. As a result, competition is quickly increasing. Therefore, it’s important to start developing an AI Overview Strategy today.
The following steps outline what your strategy should include.
1. Assess the impact of AI Overviews
The first step to building a strategy for AI Overviews is to understand the impact. Currently, AI Overviews is unavailable for all search queries meaning the impact might be low. However, this impact may change as AI Overviews become more prevalent. Therefore, this should be an evolving step.
However, an efficient method is to identify the pages driving the most traffic for you today. Using Google Analytics, extract your top pages and search for the questions they aim to answer. If an AI Overview is not presented then you have nothing further to consider.
For the articles where an AI Overview appears, make a note and you can optimise them during the implementation step.
2. Identify your niche and how it fits into your overall strategy
While AI tools won’t replace traditional search engines, they will impact the amount of traffic and where search traffic comes from. For instance, AI Overviews will likely receive a combination of explorational and informational searches. Therefore, to continue receiving traffic, it’s important to build a niche.
A niche helps position you as a Topical Authority in a chosen field, a critical component of Entity SEO. Search engines like Google will reward such websites as they offer better insights into user intent and deliver better user experience.
For instance, imagine someone searching for “smoothies for gut health.” Two different websites provide recipes. The first focuses on all types of nutrition advice. The second specialises in gut health drinks. Which of these is most likely to be an expert?
The gut health drinks website will likely be rewarded with a high ranking and a feature in Google AI Overviews because it’s seen as an authority.
Therefore, as part of your AI Overview strategy:
- Identify what your niche is going to be. The more specific you can be the better
- Make sure your niche aligns with your overall strategy
- Updated your content strategy to your niche
3. Identify what unique insights you can share as part of your AI Overview Strategy
As the popularity of AI search engines grows, competition within traditional search will increase. This will mean unique insights become more important.
Moreover, niche insights are likely to be featured in AI Overviews. After all, Google wants AI Overviews to simplify the search funnel – offering users a better experience. Therefore, unique insights aligned with niche content will be shown to people searching for a specific answer.
For example, imagine you sell continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) for health optimisation. However, most CGM-related information online focuses on controlling diabetes rather than using the device to improve overall health.
As a result, there is an opportunity to offer unique insights that you have gathered. This could include a report on the percentage of people whose gut health is improved by using a CGM or that CGMs have grown 200% in interest due to online trends.
Therefore, your AI Overview Strategy must outline:
- What unique data and insights do you capture
- What insights can be shared
- How that aligns to your niche
4. Making Entity SEO and Topical Authority the bedrock of your AI Overview Strategy
A fundamental part of your AI Overviews strategy should focus on how you will optimise for Entity SEO and build Topical Authority.
These key principles will help build your authority and shift your SEO strategy from keyword-focused to concept-focused.
This is important for your AI Overview strategy because AI Overviews prioritise comprehensive and informative content that holistically addresses user needs. Consequently, by focusing on Entity SEO and Topical Authority, you ensure your content covers your niche from every angle, making it more likely to be included in AI Overviews.
5. Assess and structure your existing content
Unless you’re starting fresh, you likely have a wealth of content waiting to be optimised for AI Overviews. Therefore, make sure your AI Overview strategy assesses it for maximum impact. You should analyse your content with four areas in mind:
- Entity Alignment: Does your content align with the entities you have identified?
- User Intent: Does your content address the “why” behind user searches? For instance, if you sell at-home allergy tests, determine if your content addresses the underlying causes and triggers, not just the symptoms.
- User Engagement: Revamp your content with low engagement. Think about including clear headings, bullet points, and visuals. Consider internal linking to relevant articles. For example, the at-home allergy test company could restructure product descriptions with visuals and clear steps on using the test.
- Google E-E-A-T: Build trust and authority with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Showcase the experience of medical professionals with bios for your at-home allergy tests.
Moreover, according to Fabrice Canel, consider the verbs your target users may use to ask questions. This can help align your content to their queries.
6. Analyse your competitors
When building your AI Overviews strategy look beyond direct competitors. For instance, a website for a mental health app should evaluate companies targeting the same health concerns, even if their delivery model differs. This could mean evaluating the government health service or a clinic. These can be indirect competitors vying for user attention in AI Overview results.
Moreover, outline:
- User queries that trigger AI Overviews related to your niche. Identify topics or questions your competitors are missing
- Gaps in the information being provided by your competitors. Can you offer a more comprehensive, trustworthy, or user-friendly approach to a specific topic?
7. Your AI Overview strategy should outline the content funnel
AI Overviews will enhance search results by understanding user intent and guiding people through their journey with summaries, suggestions, and recommendations. As a result, it will reflect the marketing funnel.
Therefore, Your AI Overviews strategy should include a section outlining how your content will align with the different stages of your marketing funnel. A flywheel approach to marketing, as demonstrated by Quiet Mark, could underpin this.
The marketing funnel should include:
- Awareness – how do you provide general insight about your service e.g. a biological age testing company could write content about what biological age is
- Interest – how do you provide specific insights e.g. how biological age is linked to running performance
- Conversion – How do you offer a solution e.g. the biological age tests you sell can show what biomarkers you need to improve to optimise your running performance
8. Building online authority through multi-channel SEO
AI Overviews will prioritise expert content. Therefore, whilst you should demonstrate your expertise by focusing on Entity SEO and Topical Authority, you will still need to prove your authority.
Traditionally, backlink building was the most obvious way to do this. However, backlinks will diminish in importance. Therefore, you must start thinking beyond them to promote your content.
One way to do this is to focus on multi-channel SEO. This means optimising your presence on several platforms to promote your content and engage new audiences. This could include building your authority on a platform like Instagram by understanding how to get more Instagram fans and creating content for more views.
Better still, the benefits of multi-channel SEO extend beyond gaining authority on Google. While it remains uncertain which search engine will become the most dominant in the future, what appears more evident is that search behaviours will change.
Google is unlikely to become obsolete, given its power base. However, rather than considering which search engine is the best, users will increasingly consider which search engine is best for a specific use case. Therefore, multi-channel SEO can help future-proof your entire AI search engine strategy.
In short, your AI Overviews strategy needs a 360-promotion plan.
9. A strong implementation plan is a must for an effective AI Overview Strategy
Understanding how to prepare for AI Overviews is fundamental to any effective strategy. This will include detailing everything from your schema markup to how you will incorporate information gain.
Therefore, take time to build a roadmap that contains:
- Your activities e.g. entity building, content updates, conversational queries
- Your timelines
- Your resources
10. Your resource profile will impact the success of your AI Overview Strategy
It’s easy to assume you can do everything with your existing resources. After all, AI advancements in SEO can only mean it’s a matter of time before complete automation is possible.
Today, ChatGPT can automatically generate content. The emergence of such AI tools has led to a 315% increase in interest in AI content, suggesting everyone is taking shortcuts. However, Google has been cracking down on AI-generated content. As a result, it may harm your search rankings.
While AI tools are not banned, you must humanise any AI text you generate as AI content can be identified. Moreover, while tools like ChatGPT can be useful to help you build backlinks and thus authority, AI cannot build them automatically for you.
As a result, building an effective AI Overview strategy takes time and resources. Therefore, make sure your plans align.
11. Evaluate your technical structure
According to Fabrice Canel, the worst thing you can do for AI machines like Google AI Overviews is use a complicated website build. He provides the example of developers wanting to use AJAX calls, a set of JavaScript web development techniques to create web applications. Yet, while this may add new functionality, it can quickly become difficult for search engines to understand your website.
Therefore, make sure you plan a technical review of your website as part of your strategy for AI Overviews. While AI tools like ChatGPT can help rewrite website code, if you don’t have the expertise, consider hiring an expert.
Moreover, AI machines can take longer to index content. Therefore, consider using IndexNow to help your content get indexed fast.
Things are always changing so keep an eye on the future
The future of SEO is undergoing a seismic shift. AI Overviews are just the first tremors, paving the way for a future dominated by AI-powered search experiences. As these technologies evolve rapidly over the next decade, SEO strategies must adapt with equal agility.
So, don’t settle for a static AI Overview strategy. Build a system for continuous evaluation, incorporating the latest trends and insights. Remember, AI Overviews are still in their infancy, and our understanding of them will grow exponentially. By embracing a dynamic approach, you can ensure your website stays ahead of the curve and thrives.
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